CEMETERY

It’s sunny outside. Glaring winter radiance that shoots light but not much heat. I’ve opened the slider doors despite the chilly breeze. Let the outside in; allow that wind to disrupt the stale air accumulated over the past umpteen dreary grey days. A sedimentary mass of cooking smells and human smells and dust and a stillness disturbed by the near constant grumble of the aircon. I’d hoped for sun today. For a photograph to accompany a review of Lana Del Rey’s Born To Die. The destination was a tiny cemetery sandwiched between two suburban houses in the back blocks of Heidelberg. The last grave was 1955 and the earliest some hundred years before. Weathered, those stones. Illegible, some. Cloaked in lichen, huddling together; some leaning, heads bowed. Only about a dozen in all, dotted around this small parcel of land half the size of a house block, too small to build on or a developer would have applied for them to be moved. So here they sit and I position the album cover to make what I hope is an arty shot. Crouching for the best angle it occurs to me I don’t give a thought to the people or lives marked by these stones. They are long gone, and so, probably, are their kin. Such maudlin thoughts have taken residence in my brain these past few months. Several factors are candidates; the death of my friend Steven, the reality of retirement, and the visit last week to our lawyer for an update of our wills. That last was quite powerful, enshrining the boy as executor of our testaments. Because he’s not a boy, he’s eighteen and more thoughtful and responsible than either of his parents were at twice his age. The decision as to how to distribute my estate if neither he nor Cal are alive had been exercising my mind, off and on, since we had these wills first committed to parchment soon after his birth. The Residuary Beneficiaries clause caught us on the hop and I knew I wanted to change what I wrote back then. Now the bulk is to be divided between the Humanist Society and an organisation called Trust For Nature. They buy properties adjoining National Parks and impose a permanent covenant on subsequent owners to keep the land intact. Seems like a good idea, though it’s really a gesture unlikely to produce a dividend for them unless the whole family cash in our chips at the same time. The other change was a tightening up of my instructions for funeral arrangements. It’s pretty clear now. “I direct that my bodily remains (minus any organs still useful to the living) be disposed of in an eco-friendly manner and that any funeral service be non-religious”. To the two most likely to have to deal with it all, I was less definitive. Do what you like. Do what works for you. Somehow I don’t think there will be a gravestone involved.

It’s getting cold so I shut the glass doors and upload the review of Born To Die. The air is still again, but at least it has moved.

LOCKED

There is something about the space in minimalist music that soothes. Perhaps a better word is ‘comforts’, though that’s not right either. It is what it the uncluttered un-busy soundscape does not do that is important. It doesn’t excite, it doesn’t activate, it doesn’t trigger. That is vital to the trauma brain, a system configured to pick up danger signals and get the fight or flight response kick started. But what if there is nowhere to run? What if the danger is real and present every day? The sound of the car door shutting after my father pulled into the driveway was a coded signal for what kind of evening we were in for. I’d pause in my play, look around to make sure there was nothing in sight to bring forth his wrath, but you never really knew. Much later I realised he brought his short fuse with him from work. From the tedium or the small humiliations accrued during ten hours away from home. Away across the other side of the city, selling engineering parts. Or something.

I built with Meccano, but was never very skilled. Had a big tin box with lots of metal strips and rods and plates and nuts and bolts and even a few motors. I could follow the picture instructions in the booklets; maybe that’s why IKEA holds few fears. But as for improvising, as for building something new, changing a design, asserting my own ideas, that never occurred to me. As a child I would escape into books; dozens, hundreds. Other people’s worlds. In Form 2 of high school I did so many book reviews my bonus marks took the total to over 100%. I was scandalised when a mark of 96% appeared at term’s end. Yet writing reviews was just a classroom skill I’d mastered; it did not seem creative. Still doesn’t. And though I enjoy the paid writing I do for the record store it doesn’t seem quite real. Or really me. Even all these decades later there remains a metal casket of imprisoned energy. A charge of firework invention that could soar and explode and keep on rising. Yalom says death anxiety is largely about un-lived life. Untapped vitality, unexpressed passions. But expressing means reaching out, taking risks. Impossible to even envisage when the foundation training, all the neural pathways, are about wariness. Monitoring, collecting and analysing sensory data, keeping still to avoid danger. Making yourself small.

There is something about minimalist music. Not much happens and it happens slowly. It doesn’t surprise, or attack. It unfolds. Unthreatening. Safe.

RAIN

The forecast said up to 30mm. 

I decided to clear the winter leaves and silted earth out of the gutter in front of the garage. It used to flood but hasn’t since we had a proper drainage pit dug near the back fence. Two and a half thousand dollars for a hole, some rock, then filling in the hole again. There’s a metaphor there somewhere. But today it wasn’t a deluge, wasn’t like the Biblical flood of the East Coast of the USA where waves surged through subway tunnels; here it was steady rain, a horizon-to-horizon cascade. A million cloud-archers shooting an endless flight of liquid arrows at the earth. I sat reading Kerouac as the dull day trickled towards the plughole of evening, trying to puzzle through the poetic and often disjointed language of The Subterraneans while listening to The Pogues on the stereo. It should have been Charlie Parker ‘cos that’s what Jack was listening too, live in a West Coast club in 1951, but it was Shane MacGowen, another genius wastrel with more talent than sense. The persistent myth of the burning moth again, extinguished (in some cases) by historic rainfall early in the season leaving a permanent strata of marsh, deep underground. Something sad and wet underneath that never dries, even in the summer, but still provides compost for a growth of sorts. 

TIDE

It’s a nice room, full of sun-bleached photos of children now grown and memorabilia of other lives. It is comfortable and light. Runners and dog walkers throng the path across the road. Families and bicycles roll silently past the window. Glimpses of the dunes, ocean beyond. Big block, lots of gum trees. The boy and I play yard cricket some days.

The big gum across the road had a resident koala for a few days. People stopping and pointing up at its furry bottom, wedged in a fork. A lucky few saw it move. Once, as the boy and I stared upwards, it lifted its head; languid, stoned on eucalyptus. Saw an echidna, too. Curled up asleep at the border between scrub and beach. A young woman in Doc Martins, all in black at summer noon, pointed it out as she called back her dog. I was going to write a story about that because she was pretty and stuck out on the white sand like an emo princess in snow. I didn’t, of course.

Creativity expands into space, that’s the idea. A notion clung to, like flotsam on the sea. Or hidden behind, as a bulwark against lack of discipline. And now there is space. Wandering about in it, I seem to have bumped into myself. A paunchy koala stuck in a tree. How much of the low mood is the legacy of the past year? How much the miserable portents? How much the entropy of middle age? Standing on a low sandbar in the narrow estuary, I watch the creek outflow meet the incoming tide. It is turning, small wavelets just strong enough to hold the freshwater current, creating a momentary standing wave. For a second, all is in stasis but all moves; water, salt, sand, strands of seaweed in a stationary dance. Incoming and outgoing in dynamic embrace. Maybe that’s what middle age is. Exploring the moment when the glass is both half-full and half empty; being scared to drink in case the balance is upset, but knowing that it will evaporate anyway.